Rambling, rumbling, rumination

Looking Back, Looking Forward

It’s been a great 2013, with our two Kickstarter projects doing well, thank you everyone! We’re still shipping out the Tinker Decks and the Tinker Dice, but we’re also looking forward to what else we may be able to do. To that end, we’d like to get some feedback from those of you who might be interested in what we’re plotting. (And if you’re one of the kind souls who come here for my other assorted posts about gaming, game design, art and photography, I’ll do more of those, too. I’ve been itching to do some “regular” blogging. Lots of ideas rattling around here. This Kickstarter stuff might just be static, sorry, but we’ll get some more signal in here, too.)

So, first and foremost, we’re planning a new campaign just for the Gearchips that we offered in the Tinker Deck campaign. We do have a few leftovers, but there is some interest in more.

These Gearchips are poker chip sized, ready for play with the decks… or whatever else. My kids just love playing with little metal gears, and they can serve well as tokens in a variety of games. They are 39mm, so they can even stand in as wreck markers in WarMachine for 40mm base units or the like. We’ll fire that up in the next month or so, since a lot of the groundwork is ready to go. We need to run a campaign because we still have to make sure we have enough interest to get a “print run” of the coins. We’re not yet far enough ahead of the curve to just go get more coins and hope the demand happens later.

Secondly, we’re planning a set of Gearchip-like game coins. Specifically, they will be gear-edged coins, all built to mesh with each other, no matter which denomination. They will have square holes in the center for use either as driver gears with a square axle, or to be able to turn freely on a round axle. They can function in any game or situation that calls for coins or chips of different denominations (say, 7 Wonders, Race for the Galaxy or Magic the Gathering), or as parts to a machine, albeit a simple, low powered one. These won’t be highly hardened, tempered, true machine-ready gears, just toys. Still, that’s enough to have fun with.

We have some questions on these, though. What sort of metal finish? How to simplify the sale of them in batches, while still allowing some customizability to allow for use in a variety of games and situations? We’ve been very impressed with the Gearchip coins, and we want to see how we can riff on the idea. If you’ve a moment, we’d love some answers to this survey or comments down below. (For all the surveys, you can select more than one option if you wish.)

Third, we’re looking at producing another deck. We had a lot of fun with the Tinker Deck, and have other ideas we’d like to experiment with, if it’s worth it. We’re not at all sure that we’ll go with Bicycle as the printer again, though. They do good work, no doubt, and they are really good people to work with, but the print run of 2500 or so decks is a significant monetary hurdle. It’s not impossible, to be sure, but there are other options that we’re considering. These, of course, don’t carry the brand name or the instant quality assurance and recognition, which can be a different sort of barrier. If you’ve an opinion (or recommendation) on printers, please let us know.

We’ve also considered making the Tinker pair of decks available in plastic, though that will definitely mean going with a different printer. We’re not seriously looking at Kem custom cards, as their prices are prohibitive. We’re looking at non-US printers for this (unless someone in the ‘States can compete).

Speaking of reprints, we did order some extras of the Tinker Dice, but if there’s enough demand, we may well do another campaign for those to get another batch going… though we’d spice it up a bit by offering new finishes. We’d simplify the ordering scheme, though, since it was overly complex this last time.

We’re also seriously considering rebooting the initial, failed, plastic Tinker Dice campaign, though we acknowledge that metal dice just seem to fit the theme better… and are in some ways, just plain cooler. Still, plastic dice have their charms, and are less likely to destroy your gaming table. They would be less costly, too.

There’s also a temptation to do some sort of token set for wargaming… but we need to figure out the best approach for that. Some of those templates are big, and might get prohibitively expensive to do in metal.

So thanks for chiming in, and for your support thus far!

…and we’ll get back to a game design post here in a little bit. There’s this one on worldbuilding I’ve had in mind for a while now…

Something that didn’t occur to me till I got part of my chip order but.. have you considered doing a case to hold the chips? one thats in theme with the deck/chips would be nice, but even just one you’ve checked and the chips fit well into would work.

I did look into that, actually. I looked at ones we could customize, especially metal ones… but all the options just looked cheap, while costing too much money, and the customization potential was really shallow.

That said, the chips are designed to be exactly the same size as standard poker chips. I haven’t compared them, since I don’t actually have any real poker chips, but I looked up the specs for them and designed them specifically so they could fit into cases people might already have.

That is a good angle to explore for a Gearchip rerun, though… I shall see what other options are out there. Thanks!